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Big Brain Cooking

As with many people, I tend to spend a lot of time interacting with my coworkers. I mean, it's about a third of your day on any given work-day. Unless you work in an environment where socializing is highly discouraged or you have problematic coworkers, you're eventually going to learn a little bit about them. I know some of their kids names, I've met some spouses, they've met the Mild Wife, and on and on. It's not that I set out trying to make friends with them, it just happened over time.

This ultimately means that we end up talking about hobbies or other random bits of life, so the conversation sometimes takes a turn towards daily life. In this instance, the topic turned to food. Early on during the pandemic, one of my coworkers was saying that he was eating a lot of oatmeal. It was something he had available, and finding groceries at the store was a bit of an uncertain proposition. So, I mentioned to him that we had found that miso paste was a quick way to add some flavor and calories to a meal. We just mixed in a bit of hot water to make a quick soup; if we had seaweed on hand, we'd add that for flavoring. All in all, it was like a five minute soup that added variety to meals.

As it turns out, he really liked that idea, and thanked me for the tip. I was glad that I could help, though if I'm being honest, I mostly forgot about it. It was just another conversation at work, and it's not like there was a life-altering event or anything.

However, this was not the last time I would speak about food with this coworker. Some time later, I happened to mention the mung bean curry that we started making. I forget why it came up, but I mentioned that we threw it into our Instant Pot, and then we had food for several days. It really did help simplify life for us, and we liked how it tasted. I mean, what's not to like? He was intrigued with the idea of meal-prepping this way, and vowed to try it at some point.

Again, I forgot about the conversation. The reason I remember it was that he came back a while later to comment that he and his significant other had been enjoying the dal. Yup, they tried it, and ended up liking it. So, we sang the praises of meal-prepping for a bit.

That's when the magic happened: I mentioned that there were also other meals that we like to make because they also yield food for days. Well, that definitely piqued his attention. Some weekends, we like to roast a (whole) chicken and have that for dinner. We don't actually finish all of the meat that evening, so we end up having left overs for a few days. I end up shredding it, so we can make all sorts of meals out of it. Best of all, we can take the left-over bones and make a broth out of it in our trusty Instant Pot. Basically, we make a cheaper version of our Christmas meal. It's tasty, it's relatively quick, and it feeds us for days.

His response to this particular piece of advice was what really prompted me to write this blog post: "Oh, that's smart! You've been on this big brain cooking for a while." There were more words after that, but I was too busy laughing about those particular words to care. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe my cooking that way before.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that some of this is most definitely the Mild Wife's brainchild. She's definitely had a hand in getting us to this point, and I seem to remember the bone broth being her idea. Still, she laughed just as hard as I did when I mentioned the "big brain cooking" going on in the Mild Home.

Big brain, indeed.

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